1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image capturing apparatus, an image capturing method, and a computer readable medium storing thereon a program. More particularly, the present invention relates to an image capturing apparatus and an image capturing method for taking an image, and a computer readable medium storing thereon a program for the image capturing apparatus.
2. Related Art
There is an image processing apparatus that generates scene characteristic information including a key frame within a scene, sections of the scene, a level of importance, and an image characteristic amount of the key frame and stores the scene characteristic information on a memory in association with a moving image, for each scene designated in moving image data. Such an image processing apparatus can carry out a digest replay replaying only a principal part of the designated moving image data or retrieve desired moving image data by means of similar image retrieval of the key frame, based on the scene characteristic information.
For example, when a user appreciates images made by recording a sports game, the user may designate a favorite player to effectively appreciate scenes on which the player comes out. However, according to the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication 2000-299829, a user cannot effectively appreciate scenes including a specific subject designated by the user.
However, it is not preferable that a user inputs manually information specifying a subject every scene, because this places a burden on the user. Moreover, in recent years, with the increase of an amount of memory mounted on a digital camera, a digital video camera, or the like, it is possible to record a larger amount of image data. However, there has been a problem that it wastes the user's time to search for images, on which a specific subject comes out, from a large amount of image data.